On Alcohol Cabinets and Bookshelves

Most people nowadays would rather have a well-stocked alcohol cabinet than a well-stocked bookshelf.

And then we wonder why kids don't read.

Because having a library at home isn't just for impressing dinner guests and Tinder matches.

By the time I was 15, I'd ransacked most of my mum's M.A. Lit reading material.

Not because I was some sort of literary prodigy, but because the books were there and broadband internet wasn't (yet). It was an all-you-can-read buffet.

Most of it made as much sense as a penguin in a desert (imagine reading the Fountainhead at age 12), but it was fascinating. And addictive. Like intellectual crack.

I gobbled up heavily annotated commentaries on Shakespeare, Homer, and Donne. My mother's notes in the margins became unexpected teachers.

Here I met Ishmael, Odysseus, and Yossarian, Scout Finch, Holden Caulfield, and Jane Eyre. Their voices are as familiar to me as those of my old childhood friends.

Here I read Austen and Auden and Asimov, Dante and Dickens and Donne, Tolstoy and Tolkien and Twain, Thomas Hardy and... fine... The Hardy Boys. There's no shame in it.

Now, I love my Kindle. It's terribly convenient. But my own library? That's my pride and joy. It's an investment in myself.

I earned it with years of scouring airport bookshops, rummaging through used bookstalls, haunting yearly book fairs, and exploring Goodreads book clubs.

Spying on the bookshelves of the people I visited.

Looking at someone's library is so much more intimate than peeking into an old photo album. It's reading the story of who they are.

Like a literary Sherlock, I piece together personalities from tattered paperbacks and well-kept hardcovers.

Spotting a familiar spine feels like meeting an old friend. New titles become discoveries and borrowed books turn into lifelong favourites.

A worn Pratchett series? A soul prone to fancy. Dog-eared Murakami novels? A dreamer lost in surreal worlds. A collection of faded travel guides? An adventurer with itchy feet, or a homebody who lives vicariously through others.

Sometimes, there are further treasures nestled between the pages. Pressed flowers from long-ago summers, faded photographs serving as improvised bookmarks, coffee stains from lost evenings, a dedication from an old flame with a date. Each artefact a breadcrumb trail of memories.

Every book is a time capsule with its own secret history and each shelf is a window into a secret life. They are maps of minds, portraits of hearts, revealing journeys taken and hopes harboured.

In the end, our bookshelves are more than furniture. They are the foundations of our personal renaissance.

Because we are not just readers of stories. We are the authors of our own.

And every book we love, every page we turn, writes another chapter in the grand narrative of who we are, and who we will become.